Surprise Picture for WISE's Fourth Anniversary

In an unexpected juxtaposition of cosmic objects that are actually quite far from each other, a newly released image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows a dying star, called the Helix nebula, surrounded by the tracks of asteroids. The nebula is far outside our solar system, while the asteroid tracks are inside our solar system. The portrait, discovered by chance in a search for asteroids, comes at a time when the mission's team is celebrating its fourth launch anniversary -- and new lease on life. In August, NASA decided to bring WISE out of hibernation to search for more asteroids. The mission was rechristened NEOWISE, formerly the name of the asteroid-hunting portion of WISE.

"I was recently looking for asteroids in images collected in 2010, and this picture jumped out at me," said Amy Mainzer, the NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "I recognized the Helix nebula right away." WISE launched into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Dec. 14, 2009. By early 2011, it had finished scanning the entire sky twice in infrared light, snapping pictures of nearly one billion objects, including remote galaxies, stars and asteroids. Upon completing its main goals, WISE was put to sleep. Now, engineers are bringing the spacecraft out of slumber, as it cools back down to the chilly temperatures required for infrared observations. The spacecraft no longer has onboard coolant, but two of its infrared channels still work and can be used for asteroid hunting.

"WISE is the spacecraft that keeps on giving," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of WISE before it transitioned into NEOWISE. In the Helix nebula image, infrared wavelengths of light have been assigned different colors, with longer wavelengths being red, and shorter, blue. The bluish-green and red materials are expelled remnants of what was once a star similar to our sun. As the star aged, it puffed up and its outer layers sloughed off. The burnt-out core of the star, called a white dwarf, is heating the expelled material, inducing it to glow with infrared light. Over time, the brilliant object, known as a planetary nebula, will fade away, leaving just the white dwarf.

Skirting around the edges of the Helix nebula are the footprints of asteroids marching across the field of view. Each set of yellow dots is a series of pictures of an asteroid. As the asteroid moved, WISE snapped several pictures, all of which are represented in this view. Scientists use these data to discover and characterize asteroids, including those that pass relatively close to Earth, called near-Earth asteroids. Infrared data are particularly useful for finding the smaller, darker asteroids that are more difficult to see with visible light, and for measuring the asteroids’ sizes.

The other streaks in the picture are Earth-orbiting satellites and cosmic rays. JPL manages and operates NEOWISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The WISE mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu, http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

2013-365

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

#SpotOrion As NASA Spacecraft Travels Cross Country

A test version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft has taken to the road for the next several weeks, as it makes its way across country for recovery tests off the coast of California. The mockup rolled away from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., on Dec. 11, and will arrive at Naval Base San Diego in California in early January. There, the Orion stand in will be used in February to support tests simulating the recovery of Orion following its return from space.

The Orion mockup will travel through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona before crossing the California border. For updates on where the capsule is or is headed, follow @NASA_Orion on Twitter. If spotted, individuals are encouraged to share their photos of the mockup via social media using the hashtag #SpotOrion. The mockup, called a boilerplate test article, has already been used in a number of tests to ensure that Orion will be ready for its first mission, Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), scheduled for September 2014. That mission will take Orion to 3,600 miles above the Earth’s surface before returning it at speeds of up to 20,000 miles per hour for a splash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

During the underway recovery tests in San Diego, the mockup will be set adrift in open and unstable waters, providing NASA and the Navy the opportunity to recover the capsule and bring it into the well deck of the USS San Diego. While deployed, the team will seek out various sea states in which to practice the capsule recovery procedures. This will help build a knowledge base of how the capsule recovery differs in calm and rough seas and what the true physical limits are.

The 18,000-pound mockup is a full-size replica of the Orion spacecraft currently being built at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. NASA and the Navy previously used this mockup to practice recovery in calm seas during a stationary recovery test in August where the spacecraft was set adrift in the waters of Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia and recovered into the docked well deck of the USS Arlington. The mockup was also dropped from 25 feet above the water of Langley’s Hydro Impact Basin to simulate different splashdown scenarios.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

NASA Investigating the Life of Comet ISON

After several days of continued observations, scientists continue to work to determine and to understand the fate of Comet ISON: There's no doubt that the comet shrank in size considerably as it rounded the sun and there's no doubt that something made it out on the other side to shoot back into space. The question remains as to whether the bright spot seen moving away from the sun was simply debris, or whether a small nucleus of the original ball of ice was still there. Regardless, it is likely that it is now only dust.  

Comet ISON, which began its journey from the Oort Cloud some 3 million years ago, made its closest approach to the sun on Nov. 28, 2013. The comet was visible in instruments on NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, and the joint European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, via images called coronagraphs. Coronagraphs block out the sun and a considerable distance around it, in order to better observe the dim structures in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. As such, there was a period of several hours when the comet was obscured in these images, blocked from view along with the sun. During this period of time, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory could not see the comet, leading many scientists to surmise that the comet had disintegrated completely. However, something did reappear in SOHO and STEREO coronagraphs some time later – though it was significantly less bright.

Whether that spot of light was merely a cloud of dust that once was a comet, or if it still had a nucleus – a small ball of its original, icy material – intact, is still unclear. It seems likely that as of Dec. 1, there was no nucleus left. By monitoring its changes in brightness over time, scientists can estimate whether there's a nucleus or not, but our best chance at knowing for sure will be if the Hubble Space Telescope makes observations later in December 2013.

Regardless of its fate, Comet ISON did not disappoint researchers. Over the last year, observatories around the world and in space gathered one of the largest sets of comet observations of all time, which should provide fodder for study for years to come. The number of space-based, ground-based, and amateur observations were unprecedented, with twelve NASA space-based assets observing over the past year.

Related Links:

For more information on Comet ISON: www.nasa.gov/ison

To download recent ISON imagery: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/CometISON.html